Attestation Is Not Enough: Why TEEs Need On-Chain Trust

#web3 #cryptocurrency #privacy #blockchain

Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) are getting a lot of hype in Web3, and for good reason. They enable confidential smart contracts, private off-chain agents, and a new class of trust-minimized applications. But as Oasis Network’s recent blog explains, remote attestation alone doesn’t give you real trust.

What Remote Attestation Actually Proves

Remote attestation gives you a signed quote from hardware that:

A specific binary ran
On specific hardware
At a specific point in time

Sounds solid … until you realize it only proves a snapshot. It doesn’t tell you anything about:

Whether the quote is fresh
Whether the enclave used the latest state
Who is actually running it
Whether the code you audited is the exact code that was deployed

And that’s why raw attestations on their own become verification theater, offloading complex crypto-hardware responsibilities onto users who aren’t security researchers.

The Critical Gaps

Even a "valid" attestation doesn’t automatically guarantee:

Freshness & Liveness - A stale but valid attestation can be reused
State Continuity & Anti-Rollback - Old state can be replayed
Operator Accountability - Attestations don’t tell you who controls the enclave
TCB Governance - Hardware vendors define threat models; users might demand stricter policies
Code Provenance - You still need reproducible builds and verifiable binaries

Simply put: attestation ≠ trust if you leave these holes unaddressed.

Turning TEEs into Trust Systems

So how do you fix this?

Instead of expecting every user to parse raw hardware quotes, Oasis proposes treating consensus as the verifier. A fault-tolerant network of stake-bearing validators: